Fatal Legacy (18 page)

Fenwick made a mental note to get a large Ordnance Survey map. ‘How long does that take?’

‘Depends on the weather. When it’s fine, between twenty and twenty-five minutes. When it’s misty like last night, more like forty.’

‘So what time did you get here yesterday?’

‘Eight o’clock in the morning, sharp.’

‘And you were here till midnight. That’s a long day.’

A moment’s hesitation, then a nod.

‘Tell me about the day.’

‘We were frantic. Guests due to arrive at seven and not one room made up – it was the decorators’ fault. They were late finishing the last bedrooms. I told the missus not to use that firm but she did anyway ’cos they were cheap. And to be fair,’ she nodded to herself in agreement, ‘they did a better job than I thought they would. Mind you, there’s no way you want to disappoint
her
, believe me.’

‘So I understand.’ Fenwick shook his head, as if in sympathy.

Irene looked at him appraisingly and took a long gulp of tea.

‘Biscuit?’

‘Please – I skipped breakfast.’

She disappeared into the pantry and came back with a fresh pack of digestive biscuits. His stomach rumbled loud enough to be heard, and she laughed as she picked up the bread knife and sliced into the shiny red plastic, a third of the way down the pack. She gestured to the spilled contents.

‘Tuck in.’

‘Thank you.’

‘So you’ve ’eard about her. Boy, it’s different now.’

‘From when?’

‘From when old Mr Wainwright was ’ere, of course.’

‘You worked here then?’

‘Yeah, off and on. Mr and Mrs Willett were the full-time staff. I came in casual. But she got rid of ’em, of course – economising, she calls it. Slave labour, I says. She’s so bloody tough. You take yesterday. We gets here, Shirley and me, at eight on the dot. She’s already up and charging about. There’s a list of things a mile long to do which any sensible person’d know was a week’s work. But oh no, not the missus.’

‘What about Mr Wainwright-Smith: did he help?’

‘Poor lamb. He was dead to the world. I went in his bedroom early on and there he was, snoring fit to burst the light bulbs.’

‘And Mrs Wainwright-Smith, what time did she leave?’ Fenwick decided to play a hunch. He didn’t trust Sally, based on her behaviour the night before, and was preparing for the fact that she could lie to him when he interviewed her. If he could establish an independent corroboration of her whereabouts he would be a lot more comfortable.

A look of calculation passed across Irene’s face, but he stared back at her, all innocence.

‘You’ll not tell ’er it’s me saying this?’

‘I can’t promise, but I won’t use names unless I have to.’

‘Hmmm.’ She thought about it for a while as she nibbled her biscuit. Fenwick kept quiet and finished his tea with a slight slurp.

‘OK. You’ll be interviewing Shirley too, won’t you, so’s it could be either of us. Well, she left ’bout half eight, pr’aps even earlier. Said she wanted to get to market first thing to pick up fresh fruit and veg for dinner. And before you ask, I didn’t see her again till lunch time, but she must’ve stopped by before ’cos all the veg were in the kitchen when we had our morning coffee.’

‘At what time?’

‘Don’t know. Let’s see. I did upstairs while Shirl was down ’ere. We ’ad a cup of tea at nine.’ She looked guilty. ‘For a few minutes is all. Then it was back to it till around eleven, I s’pose, and I think that’s when we spotted the veg, right in the sun too. All that trouble to buy them fresh, then she just left ’em there. She must’ve been in a rush. In fact, she didn’t come and check up on us once all morning; most unnatural, that.’

‘And when did Mr Wainwright-Smith wake up?’

‘What’s this all about then? Why you asking all these questions?’

Fenwick told her simply and watched her face as the news sank in. Her look of horror was quickly replaced by curiosity and morbid interest.

‘And when d’you reckon ’e died?’

‘Sometime yesterday.’

‘And he wasn’t found until past twelve last night. I must’ve cycled right past him.’ She shivered. ‘And it was suicide?’

‘Might have been, but we can’t rule out other possibilities yet.’

‘So it
might
be murder.’ She relished the word, gave a nasty grin and said: ‘Well, well. Another suspicious death. Wonder who the lucky one is
this
time?’

‘Meaning who will inherit?’

‘Yup. Be interestin’ if it’s her upstairs again, wouldn’t it?’

‘But it’s really
Mr
Wainwright-Smith who would inherit, surely?’

‘What’s ’is is ’ers, believe me. ’E’s a guest in his own ’ome half the time.’

‘So what time did he get up yesterday?’

‘I took him a cup of tea at twelve ’cos I was worried about ’im. I knew he should be at work and it just wasn’t like him to oversleep. I had to shake ’im awake and draw the curtains back.’

‘And then?’

‘I left ’im to it. Made ’im some toast when ’e come down, and a fresh pot of coffee. Missus came back shortly afterwards, and once she’d had her shower and changed, they went off to work.’

‘How did Mrs Wainwright-Smith seem when she came back?’

‘In a rush, as usual. Surprised to see hubby in the kitchen with us, that’s all.’

‘We’ll need to interview Shirley, and it would be helpful to have your address, just in case.’

‘No problem.’ She pulled a piece of scrap paper from a hook by the phone and printed the details out carefully for him.

There was a loud jangle, and she looked at the system of bells and pulleys on the wall.

‘Front door. ’Scuse me.’

Fenwick looked around the kitchen. Thick green baize covered the door, and he could hear nothing beyond it. If Irene and Shirley had been busy elsewhere in the house, it would have been easy for somebody to slip in and leave the fruit and vegetables at any time after nine o’clock. Clumsy, though, to leave them in the sun and not in the shade on the other side of the room. Someone in a rush, maybe, or not wanting to risk being seen.

Graham Wainwright had died between six a.m. and midday. A six-hour period for which neither Alexander nor Sally Wainwright-Smith had an alibi.

The door swung wide, opening the way for a chatter of voices. Sergeant Cooper and the new team had arrived. Fenwick heard Irene and Cooper, laughing already at some unheard joke and he decided to leave the rest of the questioning in the kitchen to his Sergeant. WPC Shah was waiting silently in the front hall. As fresh tea was made, he walked past pantry, flower room and store rooms to the drawing room. It was dark, and smelt of stale brandy and cigars; he drew the curtains and forced open a window.

As he pulled the curtain cords, bright light flung shadows back to reveal heavy mahogany antique tables, footstools, sofas big enough for four, and gilt; gilt everywhere, in the candle sconces, candelabra and huge mirrors hung around the walls. As he walked the length of the room across faded Persian rugs and polished inlaid flooring, his image flitted from mirror to mirror on either side, a disturbing flicker from the corner of his eye.

There was a connecting sitting room, pretty and comfortable, opening on to the front hall, on the opposite side of which lay a small office with household accounts stacked neatly beside a personal computer. Then there was the library, in which Fenwick had conducted last night’s interviews. Cracked brown leather chairs stood by walnut tables and a reading desk polished to a gentle luminescence. Huge bookcases lined every wall and
bordered the windows. His breath misted in the chill, shadowed room.

A volume had been left out on one of the tables, and Fenwick opened it at a marked page: ‘Roses – Ailments and Pests’. He heard a footfall behind him, and turned to find Alexander, unshaven, hair spiked in all directions, wrapped in a heavy towelling dressing gown.

‘Chief Inspector, I didn’t know you were here. Have you been offered coffee?’

‘I’ve had tea and biscuits, thanks. Irene saw to that.’

‘Good. I need some too. Would you mind coming down to the kitchen?’

‘Actually it wasn’t you that I came to see; it was your wife. Is Mrs Wainwright-Smith awake yet?’

A look of immediate concern crossed Alexander’s face.

‘I left her asleep in her room.’

So the Wainwright-Smiths slept apart, yet they had been married only a few months. Very curious.

‘Do you really need to trouble her yet?’

‘Yes, I do. Would you go and wake her, please, and ask her to join me here in, say, five minutes.’

It was an instruction, and Alexander left at once, frown lines of worry appearing on his face. Fenwick found Cooper and Shah and told them to join him, then completed his inspection of the rest of the ground floor.

On the opposite side of the great hall were the dining room and a marble-floored passage leading to an ornate Victorian conservatory. A second, steeply banked staircase rose from the back hall, disappearing into gloom above.

There were low voices from behind him, and he went to join the master and mistress of the house as they stood waiting for him beside the empty fireplace in the great hall.

In her five minutes, Sally Wainwright-Smith had dressed and combed her silvery fair hair back into a neat ponytail. She wore no make-up, but the fineness of her skin and the shape of her eyes were such that she needed none. Other than a pallor that made her natural delicacy seem almost waif-like, there was no trace of the hysteria of the night before.

Fenwick nodded a greeting, then walked towards the library.
Cooper, Shah and Sally followed, but when Alexander moved to do so too, Fenwick turned and shook his head. Alexander watched anxiously as his wife disappeared into the room. Sally did not turn round, nor did she appear surprised to find herself alone with the police.

Fenwick moved swiftly through the preliminaries and asked directly for her account of her movements the previous day, from the time she woke up.

‘Well, some of it’s a little vague. I woke early, gave the girls their instructions for the day, and then went back to bed. I didn’t tell them that because I wanted them to work hard; there was a lot to do and they don’t concentrate if I’m not around.’ She was looking him directly in the face, eyes wide open and frank.

‘So you didn’t go off to buy fruit and vegetables?’

She blinked, and hesitated for a fraction of a second.

‘No, I simply said that to make them think I’d be back.’

‘So you lied to them?’

‘A white lie, Chief Inspector, of no consequence.’

‘So who delivered the vegetables?’

‘The man from the market, by prior agreement.’ She said it smoothly but her cheeks flushed and Cooper made a note on his pad.

‘Go on. What happened next?’

‘Both Alex and I were exhausted. I woke just after eleven thirty, and went to have a long shower and to put my clothes out ready for the evening. When I went into Alex’s room, he wasn’t there. I found him in the kitchen, drinking coffee with one of the girls. We went straight to the office, did some work and came home. We were together for all that time. We were back here by about five thirty, something like that, and then worked like mad until our guests arrived.’

Fenwick then asked her to describe how she and Jeremy Kemp had discovered Graham’s body. She hung her head and briefly covered her face with her hands. When she looked up again, her cheeks were wet. Cooper pushed forward a clean white handkerchief that she took from him with a grateful smile.

‘Do you recall how the body looked when you found it?’

‘No.’ It was barely a whisper.

‘When Jeremy Kemp left you, what did you do?’

She shook her head but didn’t answer. There were more tears, and Fenwick waited them out.

‘Sorry. I’m still finding it hard to talk about. And to be honest, it’s all very vague. I can remember the sight of the body, then it’s all a blank until Alex came and found me. And later – I don’t know – it was just all too much.’

Fenwick pressed her about how the body had been removed from the tree, but she said that she thought Kemp had done it, and if he hadn’t done, she had no idea. Under further intense questioning she avoided any comments by effectively claiming amnesia about the crucial time of her wait under the tree.

‘Earlier in the evening, Mrs Wainwright-Smith, you’d dismissed the idea that anything could have happened to Graham.’

‘Had I? Yes, you’re right. It seemed so unlikely, he was so full of life, really carefree. And I never thought that he’d … that he could … Well, he seemed to enjoy life so much. But perhaps that was all a front. Jenny said that he’d been very worried recently – we should have listened to her.’

‘You must have known him well to be so affected by his death.’

‘No, I didn’t know him at all.’ Sally shook her head defiantly. ‘We had only just started to become better acquainted in the few weeks since his father’s death.’

Despite her tears, the hysteria of the night before and the obvious surprise that he’d known about her conversation with the girls, Sally was clearly in control and at ease. Fenwick debated with himself the merits of challenging her account of the day of Graham’s death but decided to let it rest for now. She was likely to be more careless if relaxed. He’d already caught her out in one lie, so she was capable of making a mistake.

When Sally had gone, and he sat alone with Cooper and Shah, he turned to the WPC, deliberately ignoring Cooper, and asked: ‘So, what do you make of her?’

Shah was as surprised as Cooper that she’d been consulted, but her reply came instantly.

‘I don’t trust her and I don’t believe her.’

Fenwick didn’t react, but looked to Cooper. The sergeant’s face radiated disagreement.

‘That’s harsh, and premature. I don’t see how you’ve decided that so quickly.’

‘So what’s your view, Cooper?’

‘Seemed a sensible lass to me. Good to her husband. Very hard-working. A bit flaky on some of the details from yesterday, but she’s obviously confused and upset.’

‘Amazing, isn’t it? Two completely different views – one from a man’s perspective and the other from a woman’s.’